Kathleen Cleaver in an undated photo from the 1960s.
We were on the same page in terms of our beliefs: how society needed to change, the impact of slavery and segregation on the black population, how radically society would have to be altered to achieve something like equality for black people. We had the same ideas about methods. One thing that was somewhat different, the Black Panther Party started as an all-black organization, whereas SNCC was in the process of becoming and all-black organization. SNCC was focused on rural areas, whereas the Black Panther Party was an urban organization.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Cleaver: Many people have a stereotyped notion of the Black Panther Party. Most people have a distorted idea, because most people get their ideas from the mass media, from things that were in newspapers, magazines, or on television; things that were put there by people who were part of the apparatus of the government. The FBI put a lot of stories in the newspaper. There were three key points to those stories:
One, the Black Panther Party was violent. Two, the Black Panther Party hated white people. Three, the Black Panther Party was dominated by men, with women playing only supportive roles. Those are the ideas that many people still have. Take the issue of violence. The Black Panther Party was an organization dedicated to self-defense. The context in which the Black Panther Party was operating, for people born after World War II, all these young people came out of a family or community that had been subjected to the most horrendous levels of state-sponsored terrorism — lynchings, police violence, insults and degradation. The nature of the relationship between black citizens and white citizens, mainstream government, over time, had been violent. The only way you can reach a conclusion that the Party was violent is that blacks are not entitled to defend themselves.
Secondly, the notion of hating white people. Seale dealt with that over and over. He said that what we hate is oppression. Blacks had a specific history in this county, analogous to colonialism, from slavery to segregation. We said we had been colonized, and that the members need to band together unify and struggle for liberation. That was our politics, which was different from the NAACP or the SCLC. All the members of the Black Panther Party shared that history, and were black.
Lastly, the notion that women played secondary roles. Most of the photographs that give people an image of the Black Panther Party were typically photos taken by men, selected by male editors, put in newspapers owned and run by men. The selection of images tends to be images of men because that's what these editors and publishers thought was important. There were tons of women in the Black Panther Party — but photographers never came to our meetings. They came to show a threatening image that helped justify the way law enforcement treated us. From the beginning there were women within the organization, and as Huey Newton said, we do not have any sex roles in the organization. When the armed delegation went to Sacramento, there were women in the delegation. There's a presumption that any valuable action, if the action was worth paying attention to, it was done by a man.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Cleaver: Of course. The BPP was shattered, riveted by dissension, much of which was aggravated by agents specifically sent in to do that. Any organization has disputes and disagreements. The time in which the BPP was operating, the war in Vietnam was at a peak, there were young people in Vietnam fighting against the US government. All over the world there were liberatory uprisings: people on the barricades in Paris, in Prague, young guerrillas fighting in Mozambique. Our movement was part of a worldwide youthful revolutionary movement. That is no longer the case, so you cannot use the same approach absent that global uprising.
The community we were a part of had been segregated and separated. That dynamic is not as powerful now. Young black people today are not necessarily people who feel physically or politically separate from the mainstream. The context has changed. Have I changed my views on how society needs to be changed? No. It needs fundamental root-and-branch improvement, not plastering over.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Cleaver: The first point, the call for self-determination, what you will see in place of self-determination is a much broader base of blacks engaged in the electoral political arena. Whether in Congress, as state legislators, or as mayors. That's not exactly what we said, but that's a different manifestation. As for police brutality, it's not exactly the same, it may be more targeted, it may be more specific departments, specific units, like the Street Crimes Unit in New York City. But there has been some recognition that the way the police treated young black people was wrong.
The black middle class has gotten a lot larger, and middle class people have more access to education and access to better health care, and can make more choices about how they earn a living. There has been no progress towards a UN-sponsored plebiscite, and for some people that's still a goal. There is still some focus on the UN nowadays, but the focus is on economic justice, reparations, and environmental racism.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said what we needed was a revolution in values. What the BPP talked about was what kind of values should be in place. Some of the more offensive denials of equality and human rights that were the norm have been ameliorated. There are improvements in living conditions and access to material benefits. On the core values, we don't see much movement.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the BPP? What lessons can be drawn from it by someone doing community or political work today?
Cleaver: What I think is really important about the BPP is that the BPP represented and the young people recognized that their most powerful weapon was their imagination. That's something the Party emphasized. We could imagine how the world could be different and act to bring it about. Newton used to say we have to capture the people's imagination. That was a goal, to attract people into this movement. When you look at the Ten Point Program, it articulates the very same goals that have been articulated by free blacks after slavery, over and over. These were very mainstream goals: decent housing, justice, access to education, the ability to create wealth. These kinds of demands are very central, but the way the BPP is viewed is not in terms of an organization defined by its platform. It's viewed as an organization that repudiates the way in which the larger society thinks blacks should be treated. Which was correct. But as a consequence of that, we were called gangs and thugs.
The core belief of the BPP was condensed in our slogan "All Power to the People," which is pretty clear. And it has never been repudiated, so people may try to make fun of it or co-opt it, but it's still powerful. We're not saying only poor people, or only men, or only blacks. We're saying that the source of social and political power comes from the masses of people, and in this society that's something that it's hard not to come against one way or another. It's easier to get rid of all the people who believe it than to make that belief invalid.
I spend a lot of time talking to young people who want to be very involved in social justice work. In one conversation I just had, a young man said, "one thing we learned from the Panthers is that it's very important to maintain face-to-face relationships with people in the community." We were not merely a group of theoreticians who had a vision of what needed to be changed in the world. We were trying to help people, but also trying to use the way we helped them to illustrate that there is a failure in the society's organization, to empower them to identify their own goals and needs.
I think a lot of people don't realize how young the people in the BPP were. Young people can have a lasting impact on their world. Poor people, working people can engage in political activity, you can create solutions and attempt to implement them. One of the solutions was community-controlled police; another was free breakfasts for children. Sickle cell testing, which now goes on across the country, we started. Those kinds of ways to benefit and help and respect people are viable and doable and the last thing people should do is just sit around and say there's nothing I can do. That's the absolute worst. There is no excuse for apathy.
Next:
Barbara Easley
Barbara Easley outside the Philadelphia Black Panther Party Office in 1969.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Easley: It was not about violence; it was about growing. People don't understand that the Black Panther Party is not the same as the "New Black Panther Party" which is operating in different segments of this country. They're projecting some anti-Semitic, anti-racial ideas; some of the things they put out there are not what we put out there, not what we were about.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Easley: No, I just look at the Democratic/Republican Party, that whole business, as a lot of posturing to get elected. In retrospect, there are very few people who put their money where their mouth is. We need a third party. The Green Party may be all right. There needs to be a lot of youth questioning authority. I don't mean their parents and their teachers, or the policeman on the street. That all has to go on, but it needs to be raised to a higher level. I'm talking about our so-called leadership, from the president to the city council. I have not changed. I do vote; I encourage people to get involved with that process, wherever they are. People need to figure out where they want to go, what they want to see accomplished. The '70s and '80s were the time of the "Me Generation," and the process of all this "me" means there's still a lot of work to be done. It's important to recognize that you're not the only person suffering in your community. Join something secular and local in its nature, whether that's saving a building, saving a park, or something else.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Easley: There was some progress made, but it has peaked, and it's going backwards — and not just for minorities. In some ways it's more needed now than ever. There's subtlety in some of the things they [the government] have done, so that you don't know about these law changes until someone brings your attention to them, or they make changes that affect you personally. That Ten Point Program is still needed, maybe with some minor word adjustments. But there are also other programs out there, because there has been a resurgence of oppression, and until it's your time to see it, you missed it, because you're too busy.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
Easley: I am sure when you look back there are some things you could differently. There's always something to do differently. But I don't regret anything. I'm sure we all would make changes.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the BPP
Easley: Surprisingly, it's still an influence. Some people know about it. If you're only 25 you might not know, but any student of history, if they find out about your past, they will ask you questions. The discipline and the theory and the practice are all important. They've remained a part of the work I do in social work and human services. I've grown to know several policemen who are retired, and when I mention that I was a Panther, they say, "look what's going on, where are you now?" Getting rid of drugs, helping children, respecting elders, going to school — that was our program. It was something positive, focused on the growth of a people.
Our legacy is also the legacy of everyone back to the first slave that came to America. We were just another link in history that builds on someone else's struggles. That culture of resistance, it's all around the world, and occasionally you'll hear somebody mention the Black Panther Party as an influence, because they read or heard about it or saw a movie. Youth will pick up that culture of resistance, and learn how to interpret politics and community work based on that. Take what you need to progress.
Previous: Kathleen Cleaver | Next: Elbert Howard
Elbert Howard (far right) with fellow Black Panther Party members in 1968.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Howard: I think they misunderstand quite a few things. A lot of that is because of the picture that the media painted of us, what the powers that be said about us. People had a tendency to believe that stuff. People didn't understand what our survival programs really meant: schoolchildren's breakfasts, feeding the hungry. Those programs helped immediate problems; they were also organizing tools. The Panthers themselves weren't the only ones in those programs; we got the community involved, teaching them how to become self-reliant, whereas the government wouldn't help with problems. It was about us helping ourselves.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Howard: Of course. Conditions change, and we have new situations we have to deal with, but essentially the problems are the same: there's a need for community organizing. It's more and more relevant to have survival programs, because the authorities have deteriorated health care and schools. All of that stuff is crumbling. There's a need for free health clinics, free food programs, and independent schools. For people to survive they have to have some self-reliance, community organizing. I just can't seem to stop doing this kind of work.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Howard: We've made some progress, but with the current regime and people in political power, they have diluted that progress, and tried to take the country away from some of the basic things we had in the Ten Point Program. We quoted some things from the Constitution, and the Constitution has come under attack, and been pushed aside by the people in charge of America today. Everything we said in that program, we had a human right to: jobs, housing, food, clothing, education and peace. There's always ongoing opposition to it, and in my opinion an ongoing need to fight for it.
Elbert Howard (bottom) with fellow Black Panther Party members in DC.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
Howard: Some of the methods would change. I don't know if I could change the whole Party, but if I could change anything, I would have put more emphasis on community service rather than the militant rhetoric. I would have encouraged putting the weapons away a lot sooner, even though that was a necessity at the beginning. That lasted too long. As for a little self-criticism, we in the international group could have gotten the word out to the brothers and sisters in other countries more clearly. We should have relied more on the people to come to our aid. I don't think we got that out enough. Those within the Party who had a voice, some of them were a little too militaristic.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the Black Panther Party? What lessons could someone involved in community work today draw from your experience
Howard: One lesson that they can take away is the importance of community organization, going out and educating people in the community and being educated by people in the community — finding out what their wants and needs are, figuring out ways of meeting those needs. You just can't do it alone. Revolutions are done when people are ready for revolution. Just nitty-gritty grassroots work is what is needed, and the young people ask me, "What can I do?" I tell them to start where they are, look at the overall condition. I would tell students to get themselves registered to vote and start with where they're at, to mobilize and organize for their own interests, if nothing else. Look around your community, see what people are suffering from, get involved. You can't be afraid to do that.
POV: How did you get the nickname "Big Man"
Howard: That goes way back to when I got out of the military. The guys on the base took to calling me that. We'd go into town and they would introduce me to people in the community like that. To me it meant a lot more than just my size. It dictated the way I acted. It meant I'm going to be a Big Man, I'm going to have to do things that fit that, being faithful to my friends, not telling people lies, and being some kind of a moral guy.
Previous: Barbara Easley |
Next: Billy X. Jennings
Billy X. Jennings (front left) at George Jackson's funeral, August 1971.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Jennings: They don't understand what the Party really stood for, because the media never gave the Party a chance to talk about its programs, the Party's goals, the Ten Point Program. The media was talking about guns and militancy; not the survival programs, like free breakfasts for schoolchildren, free clinics, free buses to [visit] prisons, free dental care, sickle-cell testing and voter registration. These were programs designed to educate and organize people in the community. For instance, the breakfast program served both to organize people within the community and to feed their own communities. But what you would read about were police raids on Panther offices, or guns being found.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Jennings: It's developed in a different way. The party was never into electoral politics; it was more of an educational tool, or a symbolic organizing method for changing attitudes towards politics and organizing on a local level. When we ran Bobby Seale for mayor of Oakland [in 1972], we got 40 percent of the vote. At that time the Black Panther Party was the furthest thing to the left you could possibly get. Even though he lost, the community changed. We realized that the local races, for positions like mayor, affect our lives on a daily basis.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Jennings: Not at all. We've taken steps back. Even civil rights, which were new at that time — affirmative action, the Bakke decision, things that people fought for — they've thrown away. The Ten Point Program is still relevant. Those are things we need today: an end to police brutality, the power to determine the destiny of the black community. Today, there might be some things added. Part of the Ten Point Program read, "We want freedom, land, bread, housing, clothing, education and peace." We also included, as a major political objective, the UN plebiscite among the black public to determine the destiny of our people. Reparations weren't mentioned in the Program, but that's what we were talking about.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
Jennings: Definitely. First, I would change the language the Party used. We alienated a lot of people. We believed in free speech, just coming off of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. I would change the profanity, which turned off a lot of older people. I would change the gun policy. We believed in guns as a political tool, as a means for self-protection. Malcolm talked about self-defense, and we emphasized that, but the press [used that stance to] emphasize that we were a threat. I would change the emphasis on "the lumpenproletariat" and put more emphasis on "the worker." We talked about the guns too much, and we should have organized a bit harder. We got the most support from people in the community for the survival programs, because we were doing something for them, not just talking about a struggle or a revolution.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the BPP
Jennings: It all depends on where you're at, geographically. The Party was different things in different cities. Overall, it was a black militant revolutionary organization with dedicated members who tried to serve the community. In certain places, it only survived for brief period of time. In Seattle or California, where we had the developed survival programs, the legacy is different than a place where the party was shut down early by police raids.
Previous: Elbert Howard |
Next: Yvonne King
Yvonne King ran for office in the 1972 Chicago Model Cities board elections.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
King: I think that some people don't appreciate the work ethic that existed in the Panthers, an ethic that resulted in tremendous achievements for a very young political organization with very few resources. Most of us were full-time organizers. We lived communally and made certain sacrifices. We weren't paid to work for the BPP. Monies that we received for speaking engagements were funneled back into the organization. The majority of Panthers worked very hard, and learned many different things in order to move into positions where they were needed.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
King: In essence, no. I think that when you don't have an organization, when you're looking to participate in electoral politics, then you may be more open to compromise. If you have an organization, you will follow that line within the organization. In terms of analyzing positions by other groups, by individual candidates, I think that I draw a great deal from my experience in the Party. I try to consider objective conditions, to look at people's role in the community, rather than just what they say.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
King: I guess so, in respect of the level of consciousness of the people, which has been heightened; and being able to recognize certain contradictions, dealing with health care, education, racism, the problems of the criminal justice system and incarceration. That's progress, in terms of people recognizing problems not just on the surface, but realizing how systemically these problems exist and persist. On point number nine, the right to a trial by your peers, there may be more people registered to vote today than before, and since jurors are drawn from voter registrations, there may be some improvement. However, you still have minority people being tried by all-white juries, not by their peer groups. Looking at capital cases, there are still people of color on death row who have been tried by all-white juries. So in that respect I don't think there has been a great deal of progress.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
King: As an organization, I think that we might have paid more attention to communication among ourselves, from chapter to chapter. We grew very quickly, and I don't think the founders envisioned a national organization, not to mention an international one, at the outset. It took off so quickly among people who were very young — mentally, chronologically, and politically — so building the organization might have been slower. It's very difficult to say, because of the times, and hindsight provides you the benefit of looking at your mistakes. But trying to be objective about the conditions that existed, how much control did we really have over certain variables? If one were to build an organization today, I think one could learn a great deal. Personally, I don't know how useful it would be to talk about what I would have done more or less of. It was such a rich and phenomenal experience, the best five years of my life.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the Black Panther Party? What lessons could someone involved in community work today draw from your experience
King: They really have to place the community as a priority, above themselves. As organizers they have to be principled and disciplined. They have to recognize that when one is striving to build institutions within the community, one has to develop systems, as opposed to organizing an institution around individuals or personalities.
Previous: Billy X. Jennings |
Next: Bobby Seale
Bobby Seale (center) with Stokely Carmichael, c. 1968-70.
We tried to get a campus organization going, but eventually Huey and I resigned and decided to create the Black Panther Party. I recited an antiwar poem in a crowded area around the Berkeley campus. The poem included a cuss word or two, and undercover police grabbed me and arrested me for obscenity. That caused a fight to break out, and later a uniformed police officer got into it. In that process, Huey wound up fighting a uniformed police officer and I wound up cutting one of the police officers in the hand with a pocketknife. With that we wound up in court, Huey and I, and the judge gave the both of us one year probation. That same night, we wrote the Ten Point Program. It took a week to figure out a name for the organization. We named it the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. We passed out thousands of copies of the Ten Point Program. Our goal was to observe the police who had been brutalizing our community.
I was interested in programmatic community organizing and political electoral work. Huey wasn't interested in a large organization, but I was interested in a very large and organized political party, so we could run political candidates. By the end of 1969 we had 5,000 members in 48 chapters and branches.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Seale: The great misunderstanding was generated largely by COINTELPRO. If you get a chance, read the FBI documents dealing with the Black Panther Party. The FBI would send a press release out saying that Bobby Seale fornicates with 6 different females in the office, and they named the females. A lot of this is detailed in a book by Wesley Swearingen called FBI Secrets — their counterintelligence program, their agent provocateur programs, sending press releases to press and politicians. Chicago's Mayor Daley held a press conference and announced that the Black Panther Party hates all white people. How could we? We had working coalitions with leftist white organizations. There was a political structure, from the national government on down, working to stereotype us into a corner. My point is that people think we started the shootouts. We didn't start the shootouts. The FBI would go into various cities and get the police to make arrangements for an attack on Black Panther Party offices. They had drawn out plans as to how they would go about attacking the central headquarters of the Party in Berkeley, CA. Some young white policeman who knew it was wrong stole the plans and gave the plans to our lawyers, and we put it all on the front pages. People misunderstand our focus on institutionalized racism. We worked to get people to vote in new kinds of representatives, we did grassroots organizing to change these laws.
Our goal was human liberation as a whole. Our slogan was "All power to all the people" — whether you're black, white, red, yellow, blue or polka-dotted. All power to the people, and not power only to the one percent of the population that controls 90 percent of the wealth. This is what human liberation is about. It's not about destroying stuff. Revolution is not about a need for violence, never at all. If someone attacks me, I would move to defend myself, when it's called for, but other than that I want to live and work without having to confront violence. Revolution is about a need to re-evolve more economic and social power.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Seale: No, I still believe this stuff. You just have to find new kinds of programs. The older programs — free breakfast, free food and free clothing — were successful. We'd have programs in the park to register people to vote. But the cooperative housing program never got off the ground. What that told me was that I was going to have to run for mayor. We'd have to win some more seats to get the program off the ground. I would like to see groups work with me or on their own to put together new programs. In Philadelphia, in 1985, I put together an environmental renovation youth jobs project. We got the city to pay the salaries for 35 youth and professional supervisors. We were renovating housing — small jobs, but relevant jobs. Youth job programs were part of my work way before the Party. We've got to get creative, make examples, publicize, tell people to come and see the relevance of what we're all about. When donors visited the Black Panther Party, they came and saw our real programs, a real clinic, with real doctors and medics, giving service to people. It's one thing for a politician to make promises, but grassroots organizations should attach themselves to those programs and show the people what they're doing.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Seale: One of our points was full employment, and we still have unemployment. There's been some progress in education, such as learning our true history. We have the African American Studies Department at Temple University, where I worked from 1985 to 1995, that kind of institutionalized function. And there's also a women's studies department, an Asian studies department. This is important to me, when I look at an institution that needs to break down remaining institutionalized racism. You can't call yourself a university and exclude whole ethnic groups. On the other end, police brutality was point number seven in the Ten Point Program, and in the last ten years we've seen the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo, the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas. One difference now is that racists used to get away with murdering black people. Today, at least 90 percent of those went to trial. To go back and convict Medgar Evers, that's some kind of progress. So there's been some progress, but it's not over.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
Seale: One thing I wish we had done was something that Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted done. Dr. Ralph Abernathy called me up shortly before Dr. King's death, and he wanted to see if the Black Panther Party would be willing to participate in a broad roundtable with representatives from the different groups, to hammer out and identify the common goals we're working on, to hammer out the economic and other factors relating to the direction of the protest movement. I told him that we would love to work with Dr. King and others. A month and a half later Dr. King was murdered. We coordinated and did coalition work with all the white leftist radicals, the young Chicanos, Chinese and Japanese groups, the Young Lords. We did coalition work with Dr. Abernathy in the poor people's march, when we packed the Oakland Auditorium with 7,000 people. That's something that I wish I had followed through with. There was a time when we had the notoriety to pull those organizations together. Other than that I don't regret much of anything.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the Black Panther Party? What lessons could someone involved in community work today draw from your experience
Seale: We didn't take any crap — I mean racist crap. We didn't take it. If you we're going to perpetuate some racism, if you we're going to attack us, we were going to defend ourselves. In a five-year period, 750 Black Panther Party members were arrested on more than 2,500 different charges, mostly felonies. It was an effort to try to identify Party members: the police would get their fingerprints and mug shots and then drop the charges. Less than ten percent of all those charges went to trial, and we won 95 percent of all those that went to trial. That's saying something: we had one of the best legal defense teams. We put that together early. It's also important to understand the relevance of coalition politics to all efforts at liberation. Assess the true progressive nature of an organization, regardless of who it is. That's important in coalition politics and grassroots community organizing.
Previous: Yvonne King
Introduction
Communications Secretary, 1967-71
"The context has changed. Have I changed my views on how society needs to be changed? No. It needs fundamental root-and-branch improvement, not plastering over." | Read more »
Black Panther Party, 1970-74
"The discipline and the theory and the practice are all important. They've remained a part of the work I do in social work and human services." | Read more »
Founding editor of the Black Panther Party Community News Service
"Conditions change, and we have new situations to deal with, but essentially the problems are the same: there's a need for community organizing." | Read more »
Black Panther Party, 1968-74
"The Ten Point Program is still relevant. They are things we need today: an end to police brutality, the power to determine the destiny of the black community. Today, there might be some things added." | Read more »
Yvonne King
Field Secretary, Illinois Chapter
"I draw a great deal from my experience in the party... It was such a rich and phenomenal experience, the best five years of my life." | Read more »
Bobby Seale
Co-founder, Black Panther Party
"It's important to understand the relevance of coalition politics to all efforts at liberation. Assess the true progressive nature of an organization, regardless of who it is." | Read more »
Kathleen Cleaver
POV: What drew you to the Black Panther Party originally
We were on the same page in terms of our beliefs: how society needed to change, the impact of slavery and segregation on the black population, how radically society would have to be altered to achieve something like equality for black people. We had the same ideas about methods. One thing that was somewhat different, the Black Panther Party started as an all-black organization, whereas SNCC was in the process of becoming and all-black organization. SNCC was focused on rural areas, whereas the Black Panther Party was an urban organization.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Cleaver: Many people have a stereotyped notion of the Black Panther Party. Most people have a distorted idea, because most people get their ideas from the mass media, from things that were in newspapers, magazines, or on television; things that were put there by people who were part of the apparatus of the government. The FBI put a lot of stories in the newspaper. There were three key points to those stories:
One, the Black Panther Party was violent. Two, the Black Panther Party hated white people. Three, the Black Panther Party was dominated by men, with women playing only supportive roles. Those are the ideas that many people still have. Take the issue of violence. The Black Panther Party was an organization dedicated to self-defense. The context in which the Black Panther Party was operating, for people born after World War II, all these young people came out of a family or community that had been subjected to the most horrendous levels of state-sponsored terrorism -- lynchings, police violence, insults and degradation. The nature of the relationship between black citizens and white citizens, mainstream government, over time, had been violent. The only way you can reach a conclusion that the Party was violent is that blacks are not entitled to defend themselves.
Secondly, the notion of hating white people. Seale dealt with that over and over. He said that what we hate is oppression. Blacks had a specific history in this county, analogous to colonialism, from slavery to segregation. We said we had been colonized, and that the members need to band together unify and struggle for liberation. That was our politics, which was different from the NAACP or the SCLC. All the members of the Black Panther Party shared that history, and were black.
Lastly, the notion that women played secondary roles. Most of the photographs that give people an image of the Black Panther Party were typically photos taken by men, selected by male editors, put in newspapers owned and run by men. The selection of images tends to be images of men because that's what these editors and publishers thought was important. There were tons of women in the Black Panther Party -- but photographers never came to our meetings. They came to show a threatening image that helped justify the way law enforcement treated us. From the beginning there were women within the organization, and as Huey Newton said, we do not have any sex roles in the organization. When the armed delegation went to Sacramento, there were women in the delegation. There's a presumption that any valuable action, if the action was worth paying attention to, it was done by a man.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Cleaver: Of course. The BPP was shattered, riveted by dissension, much of which was aggravated by agents specifically sent in to do that. Any organization has disputes and disagreements. The time in which the BPP was operating, the war in Vietnam was at a peak, there were young people in Vietnam fighting against the US government. All over the world there were liberatory uprisings: people on the barricades in Paris, in Prague, young guerrillas fighting in Mozambique. Our movement was part of a worldwide youthful revolutionary movement. That is no longer the case, so you cannot use the same approach absent that global uprising.
The community we were a part of had been segregated and separated. That dynamic is not as powerful now. Young black people today are not necessarily people who feel physically or politically separate from the mainstream. The context has changed. Have I changed my views on how society needs to be changed? No. It needs fundamental root-and-branch improvement, not plastering over.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Cleaver: The first point, the call for self-determination, what you will see in place of self-determination is a much broader base of blacks engaged in the electoral political arena. Whether in Congress, as state legislators, or as mayors. That's not exactly what we said, but that's a different manifestation. As for police brutality, it's not exactly the same, it may be more targeted, it may be more specific departments, specific units, like the Street Crimes Unit in New York City. But there has been some recognition that the way the police treated young black people was wrong.
The black middle class has gotten a lot larger, and middle class people have more access to education and access to better health care, and can make more choices about how they earn a living. There has been no progress towards a UN-sponsored plebiscite, and for some people that's still a goal. There is still some focus on the UN nowadays, but the focus is on economic justice, reparations, and environmental racism.
Martin Luther King, Jr. said what we needed was a revolution in values. What the BPP talked about was what kind of values should be in place. Some of the more offensive denials of equality and human rights that were the norm have been ameliorated. There are improvements in living conditions and access to material benefits. On the core values, we don't see much movement.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the BPP? What lessons can be drawn from it by someone doing community or political work today?
Cleaver: What I think is really important about the BPP is that the BPP represented and the young people recognized that their most powerful weapon was their imagination. That's something the Party emphasized. We could imagine how the world could be different and act to bring it about. Newton used to say we have to capture the people's imagination. That was a goal, to attract people into this movement. When you look at the Ten Point Program, it articulates the very same goals that have been articulated by free blacks after slavery, over and over. These were very mainstream goals: decent housing, justice, access to education, the ability to create wealth. These kinds of demands are very central, but the way the BPP is viewed is not in terms of an organization defined by its platform. It's viewed as an organization that repudiates the way in which the larger society thinks blacks should be treated. Which was correct. But as a consequence of that, we were called gangs and thugs.
The core belief of the BPP was condensed in our slogan "All Power to the People," which is pretty clear. And it has never been repudiated, so people may try to make fun of it or co-opt it, but it's still powerful. We're not saying only poor people, or only men, or only blacks. We're saying that the source of social and political power comes from the masses of people, and in this society that's something that it's hard not to come against one way or another. It's easier to get rid of all the people who believe it than to make that belief invalid.
I spend a lot of time talking to young people who want to be very involved in social justice work. In one conversation I just had, a young man said, "one thing we learned from the Panthers is that it's very important to maintain face-to-face relationships with people in the community." We were not merely a group of theoreticians who had a vision of what needed to be changed in the world. We were trying to help people, but also trying to use the way we helped them to illustrate that there is a failure in the society's organization, to empower them to identify their own goals and needs.
I think a lot of people don't realize how young the people in the BPP were. Young people can have a lasting impact on their world. Poor people, working people can engage in political activity, you can create solutions and attempt to implement them. One of the solutions was community-controlled police; another was free breakfasts for children. Sickle cell testing, which now goes on across the country, we started. Those kinds of ways to benefit and help and respect people are viable and doable and the last thing people should do is just sit around and say there's nothing I can do. That's the absolute worst. There is no excuse for apathy.
Next:
Barbara Easley
Kathleen Cleaver was involved with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) before she joined the Black Panther Party in 1967. She served as the Party's Communications Secretary and was the first woman to join the Party's Central Committee. She is currently a senior lecturer at Emory Law School and at Yale University and the Executive Producer of the International Black Panther Film Festival. With George Katsiaficas, she was the co-editor of Liberation, Imagination, and the Black Panther Party.
Barbara Easley
POV: What drew you to the Black Panther Party originally
Barbara Easley: I was a student at San Francisco State college, and I joined the Black Student Union during the time of the Vietnam War. The Black Panther Party came to San Francisco State -- Huey Newton, Bobby Seale, and Warren Wells -- but I was a little frightened of them, so I didn't get deeply involved. Later I met Eldridge and Kathleen Cleaver, and started doing some secretarial work for them. That led me into meeting Donald Cox, the Field Marshal at the time. The next thing I knew, I was traveling to New York to support the New York 21 [Party members who had been arrested in New York City]. I came to Philadelphia for a year, working with Mumia Abu-Jamal and a variety of other people. The pressure on the Panthers was increasing. Eldridge left for Cuba, and then Algiers. Donald Cox, my husband at the time, was indicted for a variety of charges, and when he went to Algiers I went with him, because Kathleen Cleaver was also having a baby. Next thing I knew, I was in North Korea, where I stayed until October 1970. As part of the international branch of the Black Panther Party, I set up a nursery and a library, and I became a kind of guerrilla ambassador to the other African liberation movements there.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Easley: It was not about violence; it was about growing. People don't understand that the Black Panther Party is not the same as the "New Black Panther Party" which is operating in different segments of this country. They're projecting some anti-Semitic, anti-racial ideas; some of the things they put out there are not what we put out there, not what we were about.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Easley: No, I just look at the Democratic/Republican Party, that whole business, as a lot of posturing to get elected. In retrospect, there are very few people who put their money where their mouth is. We need a third party. The Green Party may be all right. There needs to be a lot of youth questioning authority. I don't mean their parents and their teachers, or the policeman on the street. That all has to go on, but it needs to be raised to a higher level. I'm talking about our so-called leadership, from the president to the city council. I have not changed. I do vote; I encourage people to get involved with that process, wherever they are. People need to figure out where they want to go, what they want to see accomplished. The '70s and '80s were the time of the "Me Generation," and the process of all this "me" means there's still a lot of work to be done. It's important to recognize that you're not the only person suffering in your community. Join something secular and local in its nature, whether that's saving a building, saving a park, or something else.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Easley: There was some progress made, but it has peaked, and it's going backwards -- and not just for minorities. In some ways it's more needed now than ever. There's subtlety in some of the things they [the government] have done, so that you don't know about these law changes until someone brings your attention to them, or they make changes that affect you personally. That Ten Point Program is still needed, maybe with some minor word adjustments. But there are also other programs out there, because there has been a resurgence of oppression, and until it's your time to see it, you missed it, because you're too busy.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
Easley: I am sure when you look back there are some things you could differently. There's always something to do differently. But I don't regret anything. I'm sure we all would make changes.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the BPP
Easley: Surprisingly, it's still an influence. Some people know about it. If you're only 25 you might not know, but any student of history, if they find out about your past, they will ask you questions. The discipline and the theory and the practice are all important. They've remained a part of the work I do in social work and human services. I've grown to know several policemen who are retired, and when I mention that I was a Panther, they say, "look what's going on, where are you now?" Getting rid of drugs, helping children, respecting elders, going to school -- that was our program. It was something positive, focused on the growth of a people.
Our legacy is also the legacy of everyone back to the first slave that came to America. We were just another link in history that builds on someone else's struggles. That culture of resistance, it's all around the world, and occasionally you'll hear somebody mention the Black Panther Party as an influence, because they read or heard about it or saw a movie. Youth will pick up that culture of resistance, and learn how to interpret politics and community work based on that. Take what you need to progress.
Previous: Kathleen Cleaver | Next: Elbert Howard
Barbara Easley was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1970 to 1974. She worked in the Party offices in Oakland, Philadelphia, New York, and with the international branch of the Party in Africa. She volunteers as a consultant for a community housing group in Philadelphia, and she is organizing the city's first Panther Film Festival in 2005.
Elbert Howard
POV: What drew you to the Black Panther Party originally
Elbert Howard: Basically the need in the community, because when I got out of the service in 1960, things were bad in terms of unemployment and poor housing and police brutality. At the time, Bobby Seale, Huey Newton, and myself were in college, studying revolutionary theories and practices and so forth. We were seeking ways of dealing with problems in our community. We studied the way some other countries dealt with problems; some things could be implemented in our situation. Personal conflicts with the Oakland police spurred us to do things that called attention to us. What was different about our situation was studying revolutionary theories. When Malcolm X came along, I really took notice of what he was saying, talking about defending ourselves and defending our community, as opposed to the nonviolent [approach] that was going on at the time. We were young and we didn't necessarily believe in the nonviolent approach, because we saw the beatings, having dogs sicked on us, having our mothers and sisters brutalized by police. So that's where we drew the line, and that's where the difference came from.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Howard: I think they misunderstand quite a few things. A lot of that is because of the picture that the media painted of us, what the powers that be said about us. People had a tendency to believe that stuff. People didn't understand what our survival programs really meant: schoolchildren's breakfasts, feeding the hungry. Those programs helped immediate problems; they were also organizing tools. The Panthers themselves weren't the only ones in those programs; we got the community involved, teaching them how to become self-reliant, whereas the government wouldn't help with problems. It was about us helping ourselves.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Howard: Of course. Conditions change, and we have new situations we have to deal with, but essentially the problems are the same: there's a need for community organizing. It's more and more relevant to have survival programs, because the authorities have deteriorated health care and schools. All of that stuff is crumbling. There's a need for free health clinics, free food programs, and independent schools. For people to survive they have to have some self-reliance, community organizing. I just can't seem to stop doing this kind of work.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Howard: We've made some progress, but with the current regime and people in political power, they have diluted that progress, and tried to take the country away from some of the basic things we had in the Ten Point Program. We quoted some things from the Constitution, and the Constitution has come under attack, and been pushed aside by the people in charge of America today. Everything we said in that program, we had a human right to: jobs, housing, food, clothing, education and peace. There's always ongoing opposition to it, and in my opinion an ongoing need to fight for it.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
Howard: Some of the methods would change. I don't know if I could change the whole Party, but if I could change anything, I would have put more emphasis on community service rather than the militant rhetoric. I would have encouraged putting the weapons away a lot sooner, even though that was a necessity at the beginning. That lasted too long. As for a little self-criticism, we in the international group could have gotten the word out to the brothers and sisters in other countries more clearly. We should have relied more on the people to come to our aid. I don't think we got that out enough. Those within the Party who had a voice, some of them were a little too militaristic.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the Black Panther Party? What lessons could someone involved in community work today draw from your experience
Howard: One lesson that they can take away is the importance of community organization, going out and educating people in the community and being educated by people in the community -- finding out what their wants and needs are, figuring out ways of meeting those needs. You just can't do it alone. Revolutions are done when people are ready for revolution. Just nitty-gritty grassroots work is what is needed, and the young people ask me, "What can I do?" I tell them to start where they are, look at the overall condition. I would tell students to get themselves registered to vote and start with where they're at, to mobilize and organize for their own interests, if nothing else. Look around your community, see what people are suffering from, get involved. You can't be afraid to do that.
POV: How did you get the nickname "Big Man"
Howard: That goes way back to when I got out of the military. The guys on the base took to calling me that. We'd go into town and they would introduce me to people in the community like that. To me it meant a lot more than just my size. It dictated the way I acted. It meant I'm going to be a Big Man, I'm going to have to do things that fit that, being faithful to my friends, not telling people lies, and being some kind of a moral guy.
Previous: Barbara Easley |
Next: Billy X. Jennings
Elbert "Big Man" Howard, one of the original six members of the Black Panther Party, served as the Party's deputy minister of information and as a member of the International Solidarity Committee. He was the founding editor of the Party's newspaper, the Black Panther Party Community News Service. He currently works as an advisor to several groups in Memphis working to improve education and health care.
Billy X. Jennings
POV: What drew you to the Black Panther Party originally
Billy X. Jennings: I came into the party in 1968, after high school. I had lived in San Diego, and I traveled to Oakland in June 1968. That's also when the "Free Huey" movement started. My college was three blocks from the courthouse where Huey Newton was on trial. A member of the Party lived in my apartment building, and we talked about what the Party was doing. This was the time when The Autobiography of Malcolm X had just been published. The Voting Rights Act had just passed. People were being beaten up for trying to eat at lunch counters. I grew up in that kind of atmosphere, with dogs being sicced on civil rights marchers. The Watts Riots happened a few years before that. The Ten Point Program sounded like a feasible program. It included things that black people needed, plus [I was drawn to] the self-defense aspect of the Party's program.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Jennings: They don't understand what the Party really stood for, because the media never gave the Party a chance to talk about its programs, the Party's goals, the Ten Point Program. The media was talking about guns and militancy; not the survival programs, like free breakfasts for schoolchildren, free clinics, free buses to [visit] prisons, free dental care, sickle-cell testing and voter registration. These were programs designed to educate and organize people in the community. For instance, the breakfast program served both to organize people within the community and to feed their own communities. But what you would read about were police raids on Panther offices, or guns being found.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Jennings: It's developed in a different way. The party was never into electoral politics; it was more of an educational tool, or a symbolic organizing method for changing attitudes towards politics and organizing on a local level. When we ran Bobby Seale for mayor of Oakland [in 1972], we got 40 percent of the vote. At that time the Black Panther Party was the furthest thing to the left you could possibly get. Even though he lost, the community changed. We realized that the local races, for positions like mayor, affect our lives on a daily basis.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Jennings: Not at all. We've taken steps back. Even civil rights, which were new at that time -- affirmative action, the Bakke decision, things that people fought for -- they've thrown away. The Ten Point Program is still relevant. Those are things we need today: an end to police brutality, the power to determine the destiny of the black community. Today, there might be some things added. Part of the Ten Point Program read, "We want freedom, land, bread, housing, clothing, education and peace." We also included, as a major political objective, the UN plebiscite among the black public to determine the destiny of our people. Reparations weren't mentioned in the Program, but that's what we were talking about.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
Jennings: Definitely. First, I would change the language the Party used. We alienated a lot of people. We believed in free speech, just coming off of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley. I would change the profanity, which turned off a lot of older people. I would change the gun policy. We believed in guns as a political tool, as a means for self-protection. Malcolm talked about self-defense, and we emphasized that, but the press [used that stance to] emphasize that we were a threat. I would change the emphasis on "the lumpenproletariat" and put more emphasis on "the worker." We talked about the guns too much, and we should have organized a bit harder. We got the most support from people in the community for the survival programs, because we were doing something for them, not just talking about a struggle or a revolution.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the BPP
Jennings: It all depends on where you're at, geographically. The Party was different things in different cities. Overall, it was a black militant revolutionary organization with dedicated members who tried to serve the community. In certain places, it only survived for brief period of time. In Seattle or California, where we had the developed survival programs, the legacy is different than a place where the party was shut down early by police raids.
Previous: Elbert Howard |
Next: Yvonne King
Billy Jennings grew up in San Diego and moved to Oakland in June 1968. He was a member of the Black Panther Party from 1968 to 1974. He currently works to maintain the legacy of the Black Panther Party, running the website It's About Time. It's About Time was started by former members of the Black Panther Party in Sacramento in 1995.
Yvonne King
POV: What drew you to the Black Panther Party originally
Yvonne King ran for office in the 1972 Chicago Model Cities board elections.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
King: I think that some people don't appreciate the work ethic that existed in the Panthers, an ethic that resulted in tremendous achievements for a very young political organization with very few resources. Most of us were full-time organizers. We lived communally and made certain sacrifices. We weren't paid to work for the BPP. Monies that we received for speaking engagements were funneled back into the organization. The majority of Panthers worked very hard, and learned many different things in order to move into positions where they were needed.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
King: In essence, no. I think that when you don't have an organization, when you're looking to participate in electoral politics, then you may be more open to compromise. If you have an organization, you will follow that line within the organization. In terms of analyzing positions by other groups, by individual candidates, I think that I draw a great deal from my experience in the Party. I try to consider objective conditions, to look at people's role in the community, rather than just what they say.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
King: I guess so, in respect of the level of consciousness of the people, which has been heightened; and being able to recognize certain contradictions, dealing with health care, education, racism, the problems of the criminal justice system and incarceration. That's progress, in terms of people recognizing problems not just on the surface, but realizing how systemically these problems exist and persist. On point number nine, the right to a trial by your peers, there may be more people registered to vote today than before, and since jurors are drawn from voter registrations, there may be some improvement. However, you still have minority people being tried by all-white juries, not by their peer groups. Looking at capital cases, there are still people of color on death row who have been tried by all-white juries. So in that respect I don't think there has been a great deal of progress.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
King: As an organization, I think that we might have paid more attention to communication among ourselves, from chapter to chapter. We grew very quickly, and I don't think the founders envisioned a national organization, not to mention an international one, at the outset. It took off so quickly among people who were very young -- mentally, chronologically, and politically -- so building the organization might have been slower. It's very difficult to say, because of the times, and hindsight provides you the benefit of looking at your mistakes. But trying to be objective about the conditions that existed, how much control did we really have over certain variables? If one were to build an organization today, I think one could learn a great deal. Personally, I don't know how useful it would be to talk about what I would have done more or less of. It was such a rich and phenomenal experience, the best five years of my life.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the Black Panther Party? What lessons could someone involved in community work today draw from your experience
King: They really have to place the community as a priority, above themselves. As organizers they have to be principled and disciplined. They have to recognize that when one is striving to build institutions within the community, one has to develop systems, as opposed to organizing an institution around individuals or personalities.
Previous: Billy X. Jennings |
Next: Bobby Seale
Yvonne King joined the Black Panther Party in 1969. She served as field secretary for the Illinois chapter. From 1988 to 2002, she lived in western Africa, teaching in Ghana, Nigeria and Angola. She currently resides in Philadelphia, where she continues to be involved in social justice work in the United States and in Africa.
Bobby Seale
POV: What inspired you to found the Black Panther Party
We tried to get a campus organization going, but eventually Huey and I resigned and decided to create the Black Panther Party. I recited an antiwar poem in a crowded area around the Berkeley campus. The poem included a cuss word or two, and undercover police grabbed me and arrested me for obscenity. That caused a fight to break out, and later a uniformed police officer got into it. In that process, Huey wound up fighting a uniformed police officer and I wound up cutting one of the police officers in the hand with a pocketknife. With that we wound up in court, Huey and I, and the judge gave the both of us one year probation. That same night, we wrote the Ten Point Program. It took a week to figure out a name for the organization. We named it the Black Panther Party for Self Defense. We passed out thousands of copies of the Ten Point Program. Our goal was to observe the police who had been brutalizing our community.
I was interested in programmatic community organizing and political electoral work. Huey wasn't interested in a large organization, but I was interested in a very large and organized political party, so we could run political candidates. By the end of 1969 we had 5,000 members in 48 chapters and branches.
POV: Many people have a settled idea of what the BPP was about. What do you think is something that people don't appreciate, or misunderstand
Seale: The great misunderstanding was generated largely by COINTELPRO. If you get a chance, read the FBI documents dealing with the Black Panther Party. The FBI would send a press release out saying that Bobby Seale fornicates with 6 different females in the office, and they named the females. A lot of this is detailed in a book by Wesley Swearingen called FBI Secrets -- their counterintelligence program, their agent provocateur programs, sending press releases to press and politicians. Chicago's Mayor Daley held a press conference and announced that the Black Panther Party hates all white people. How could we? We had working coalitions with leftist white organizations. There was a political structure, from the national government on down, working to stereotype us into a corner. My point is that people think we started the shootouts. We didn't start the shootouts. The FBI would go into various cities and get the police to make arrangements for an attack on Black Panther Party offices. They had drawn out plans as to how they would go about attacking the central headquarters of the Party in Berkeley, CA. Some young white policeman who knew it was wrong stole the plans and gave the plans to our lawyers, and we put it all on the front pages. People misunderstand our focus on institutionalized racism. We worked to get people to vote in new kinds of representatives, we did grassroots organizing to change these laws.
Our goal was human liberation as a whole. Our slogan was "All power to all the people" -- whether you're black, white, red, yellow, blue or polka-dotted. All power to the people, and not power only to the one percent of the population that controls 90 percent of the wealth. This is what human liberation is about. It's not about destroying stuff. Revolution is not about a need for violence, never at all. If someone attacks me, I would move to defend myself, when it's called for, but other than that I want to live and work without having to confront violence. Revolution is about a need to re-evolve more economic and social power.
POV: Has your approach to politics or community work changed since then
Seale: No, I still believe this stuff. You just have to find new kinds of programs. The older programs -- free breakfast, free food and free clothing -- were successful. We'd have programs in the park to register people to vote. But the cooperative housing program never got off the ground. What that told me was that I was going to have to run for mayor. We'd have to win some more seats to get the program off the ground. I would like to see groups work with me or on their own to put together new programs. In Philadelphia, in 1985, I put together an environmental renovation youth jobs project. We got the city to pay the salaries for 35 youth and professional supervisors. We were renovating housing -- small jobs, but relevant jobs. Youth job programs were part of my work way before the Party. We've got to get creative, make examples, publicize, tell people to come and see the relevance of what we're all about. When donors visited the Black Panther Party, they came and saw our real programs, a real clinic, with real doctors and medics, giving service to people. It's one thing for a politician to make promises, but grassroots organizations should attach themselves to those programs and show the people what they're doing.
POV: Looking back at the Ten Point Program, do you think we've made progress towards those goals
Seale: One of our points was full employment, and we still have unemployment. There's been some progress in education, such as learning our true history. We have the African American Studies Department at Temple University, where I worked from 1985 to 1995, that kind of institutionalized function. And there's also a women's studies department, an Asian studies department. This is important to me, when I look at an institution that needs to break down remaining institutionalized racism. You can't call yourself a university and exclude whole ethnic groups. On the other end, police brutality was point number seven in the Ten Point Program, and in the last ten years we've seen the beating of Rodney King, the killing of Amadou Diallo, the murder of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas. One difference now is that racists used to get away with murdering black people. Today, at least 90 percent of those went to trial. To go back and convict Medgar Evers, that's some kind of progress. So there's been some progress, but it's not over.
POV: Looking back at your time in the Black Panther Party, are there things you would do differently? Would some of your goals or methods change
Seale: One thing I wish we had done was something that Martin Luther King, Jr. wanted done. Dr. Ralph Abernathy called me up shortly before Dr. King's death, and he wanted to see if the Black Panther Party would be willing to participate in a broad roundtable with representatives from the different groups, to hammer out and identify the common goals we're working on, to hammer out the economic and other factors relating to the direction of the protest movement. I told him that we would love to work with Dr. King and others. A month and a half later Dr. King was murdered. We coordinated and did coalition work with all the white leftist radicals, the young Chicanos, Chinese and Japanese groups, the Young Lords. We did coalition work with Dr. Abernathy in the poor people's march, when we packed the Oakland Auditorium with 7,000 people. That's something that I wish I had followed through with. There was a time when we had the notoriety to pull those organizations together. Other than that I don't regret much of anything.
POV: What do you think is the lasting impact of the Black Panther Party? What lessons could someone involved in community work today draw from your experience
Seale: We didn't take any crap -- I mean racist crap. We didn't take it. If you we're going to perpetuate some racism, if you we're going to attack us, we were going to defend ourselves. In a five-year period, 750 Black Panther Party members were arrested on more than 2,500 different charges, mostly felonies. It was an effort to try to identify Party members: the police would get their fingerprints and mug shots and then drop the charges. Less than ten percent of all those charges went to trial, and we won 95 percent of all those that went to trial. That's saying something: we had one of the best legal defense teams. We put that together early. It's also important to understand the relevance of coalition politics to all efforts at liberation. Assess the true progressive nature of an organization, regardless of who it is. That's important in coalition politics and grassroots community organizing.
Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party with Huey P. Newton in Oakland, California in 1966. He performed a variety of functions in the Party, and was one of the eight activist-organizers charged with conspiracy in the aftermath of the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. He continues to be involved in community work in Oakland and Philadelphia. He is the author of Seize the Time: the Story of the Black Panther Party and Huey P. Newton, A Lonely Rage: the Autobiography of Bobby Seale, and Barbeque'n With Bobby.